75% of university entrepreneurship centers now describe their mission as serving the entire campus.
Not just business students. Not just MBA candidates. The whole university.
Engineering students building hardware prototypes. Design students launching creative studios. Public health students developing community health tools. Faculty from a half-dozen departments running interdisciplinary projects. And in many cases, alumni and community entrepreneurs walking through the same doors.
That’s the picture painted by the 2025 State of Entrepreneurship Education survey, conducted by the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) in partnership with USC’s Marshall School of Business.
The study found that three out of four centers are either housed in a business school but chartered to support the full institution, or operating as a standalone office with a university-wide mandate.
A clear hub model has emerged.
There’s more. The average university has substantially more than one entrepreneurship program on campus. The survey lead, Elisa Grossman, noted that many institutions have an average of three, spanning business schools, engineering hubs, and tech transfer offices.
Yet almost none of those non-business-school programs were represented in the survey responses.
That tells you something important: the center you run is probably the connective tissue between all of those programs. You’re the hub. And managing a hub that serves an entire university is a fundamentally different challenge than managing a program that serves one department.
Coworks did not conduct this research. But as a company that builds space management software for community-driven flexible workspaces, we recognized the operational reality immediately.
Because managing a space where different groups with different needs share the same infrastructure is exactly what our platform was designed for.
Out of 140 university entrepreneurship centers surveyed, 87 are using Excel to track their impact. Another 57 said they rely on Google Drive.
The 75% number is striking. But what does it actually mean for the person managing the center day to day?
It means your space isn’t serving a single, predictable population. On any given Tuesday, you might have:
Every one of those people has different needs, different access permissions, and different reasons for being in your space. And every one of those interactions generates data that someone, somewhere, is going to ask you about.
How many unique students from outside the business school used the center last semester?
Which departments are most engaged?
How does community usage compare to student usage?
Is the makerspace at capacity on Thursdays, and if so, who’s using it?
If you’re managing all of this with a shared Google Calendar, a door propped open, and a sign-in sheet on a clipboard, you already know the answer to those questions: you don’t have one.
Let’s be clear about something: the fact that 75% of centers serve the whole campus is a good thing. It means entrepreneurship education has expanded beyond the business school. It means more students have access to the kind of programming that builds creative confidence, resilience, and real-world skills. The hub model is working.
But the operational infrastructure hasn’t kept up.
The GCEC survey found that the staffing at these centers ranges from one to two people all the way up to 25 or 30, and that staffing doesn’t directly correlate with the size of the institution. Smaller liberal arts schools tend to have leaner teams. But even at well-resourced programs, the person managing the physical space is often also teaching adjunct courses, running programming, coordinating mentors, and reporting to the dean.
Now layer in the hub complexity: multiple departments, multiple user types, multiple stakeholder groups each wanting to understand what the center is doing for their people. The operational load of the hub model is enormous. And in most cases, it’s landing on the same one or two people who were managing the center when it served just one school.
In our conversations with university program leaders, the same five challenges come up again and again when a center starts serving the broader campus:
1. Access and permissions get complicated fast. When your center served only business students, you could leave the door unlocked during business hours and call it a day. When you’re serving students from six departments, alumni, community members, and corporate partners—each with different levels of access to different spaces at different times—you need a real system. Otherwise you’re either leaving everything open (security risk) or manually managing access for every individual (time sink).
2. Booking conflicts multiply. One shared calendar might work when 30 students are using the space. It breaks when three departments, two external partners, and a visiting mentor cohort are all trying to book the same meeting rooms. Double-bookings aren’t just annoying. They erode trust in the center as a reliable resource.
3. Reporting gets fragmented by stakeholder. Your dean wants to know about business student outcomes. The engineering department wants to know how many of their students used the maker space. The provost wants the campus-wide number. The development office wants community engagement metrics. If your data lives in spreadsheets, you’re building a different report for each audience from scratch.
4. Community building across silos is hard to track. One of the greatest things about the hub model is that it creates collisions between people who would never otherwise meet. A design student sits next to an engineering student and a startup founder, and something sparks. But if you can’t show that those cross-pollinations are happening, you can’t make the case for why the hub matters more than separate departmental programs.
5. Events and programming serve multiple audiences simultaneously. A pitch night might draw students from four departments, three alumni, two community judges, and a corporate sponsor. Managing registration, attendance, and follow-up across all of those groups with manual tools is a recipe for dropped balls.
Coworks is a space management platform built for multi-user, multi-purpose flexible workspaces. It was designed from the ground up to handle environments where different people with different roles use the same physical space in different ways. That’s the exact operating model of a campus-wide entrepreneurship hub.
Here’s how the platform maps to the five challenges above:
Role-based access that manages itself. Set up member types that reflect your actual user base: enrolled students get 24/7 access. Alumni get weekday access. Community members get access during open hours only. Corporate partners get premium access to reserved space. Coworks integrates with door access systems like Verkada, Kisi, and Doordeck, so permissions are enforced automatically. When someone’s membership changes, their access updates in real time.
A booking system that prevents conflicts and captures data. Every room, desk, and maker space slot is bookable through the platform. Members book from their phone. Capacity limits are enforced automatically. And every booking creates a data point you can use later for utilization reporting—without anyone having to manually record it.
One data set, many reports. Because all activity flows through a single system, you can slice the data any way you need to. Pull a report for the engineering department showing their students’ usage. Pull a different view for the dean showing campus-wide engagement. Pull a revenue report for the development office. Same underlying data, different lenses. No reconciliation required.
A community layer that makes cross-pollination visible. Coworks includes a member directory and community features that let people discover each other. When a design student and an engineering student are both checked into the maker space at the same time, they can see each other in the app. And you can see the pattern: which spaces create the most cross-departmental interaction, and when.
Event management built into the same platform. Create events, manage registration, track attendance, and follow up—all within the system that already knows who your members are. No separate event tool. No manual import of attendee lists. And the attendance data feeds directly into the same reporting engine as everything else.
In the first article of this series, we talked about the disconnect the GCEC survey found between what program directors value and what institutional leadership demands. That disconnect gets amplified in the hub model.
When your center serves the whole campus, you’re reporting to more stakeholders, not fewer. And each one cares about a different slice of what you do. The questions you need to answer look something like this:
With Coworks, every one of those questions is answerable from the data the platform captures during normal operations. No weekend spreadsheet projects. No guessing. No asking your student workers to remember who came in last Thursday.
The GCEC survey found that the average institution has three or more entrepreneurship programs, many of which are operating independently across different schools and departments. That fragmentation creates an opportunity for the center that positions itself as the operational hub.
Imagine being able to go to your provost and say: “Our center served 2,400 unique students from 14 departments last year. We hosted 180 events with an average attendance of 35. Our maker space ran at 78% utilization. And we generated $45,000 in revenue from community memberships and room rentals.”
That’s not a center asking for money. That’s a center demonstrating institutional value. And the data to tell that story doesn’t require a research team. It requires a platform that captures the data as your space gets used.
The GCEC data also showed that only 12 to 15 percent of centers currently prioritize economic development and community engagement. And 46 out of 111 U.S. respondents said their program does nothing with economic development at all. For hubs that are already welcoming community members, that’s a positioning gap. The schools that can demonstrate community impact alongside student impact will have a stronger case when budget decisions get made.
The entrepreneurship center I walked into as an undergrad wasn’t just a business school thing. I remember sitting in that space next to students from departments I’d never set foot in. There was an architecture student working on modular housing. A public policy student building a civic tech prototype.
We had nothing in common except that we were all building something and we’d all found our way to this one room.
That’s the hub model.
And that room is where I first understood that entrepreneurship wasn’t just about startups. It was about solving problems, and the best problem-solving happens when different perspectives collide.
The centers running this model today are doing something extraordinary. They’re creating the conditions for exactly that kind of collision at scale, across an entire university.
What they haven’t had is the operational infrastructure to manage it without burning out the one or two people holding it all together.
That’s the problem we built Coworks software to solve. Not because we set out to work with universities, but because a campus-wide entrepreneurship hub operates exactly like the multi-use, community-driven flexible workspaces we’ve been building for since day one.
If you’re the person holding the hub together, I’d love to hear how it’s going. And I’d love to show you what it looks like when the infrastructure does some of the heavy lifting for you.
About the data cited in this article: The findings referenced here come from the 2025 State of Entrepreneurship Education survey, conducted by the Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) in partnership with the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. The study was led by Elisa Grossman, Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship at USC and former Academic Director at the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.
University entrepreneurship centers struggle with data and reporting due to fragmented systems. Coworks software can drive better outcomes.
University entrepreneurship centers can leverage underused physical assets to generate revenue and strengthen community connections.
Join Coworks at the 2024 GCEC Conference to explore innovations in university entrepreneurship centers from November 14-16 at Babson College in...
